1076: Analyzing 2025's Biggest Misses

00:00:02
Speaker 1: This is the Labor Podcast with your host JJ zacherathis jj Zachers. What's up everyone, It's JJ Zacharyesen in this episode ten to seventy six of the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast. Thanks for tuning in. During the off season, you'll typically hear either a Mailbag episode or a Perspective's episode every Friday, but with this first week back, the schedule is a little bit different. Today, we're gonna look at what went wrong for me in twenty twenty five.

00:00:33
Speaker 2: Some of you might wonder why I do these episodes. One of the things that I got wrong one of the things that I got right.

00:00:38
Speaker 1: It's not to sit here and just go over every prediction that I made before and during the twenty twenty five fantasy season. There are hundreds of them that wouldn't really be helpful or realistic. I do these episodes to talk about the big stuff and to show you how I think about results, because even when a result says one thing and my process said another, I may not be that concerned about that miss. And the reverse is true too. Sometimes I get things right, but I get things right for the wrong reasons. And I also think transparency is really important in this business. The way I analyze this game isn't to just say, hey, here are the answers to the test. Just trust me, bro. I want to show my work. I want to explain how I came to the conclusions that I came to and I want you guys to go on that journey with me, because, in my opinion, that's how you win fantasy championships in a more sustainable way. You understand the process, not just the results. So that being said, today's day where I make fun of all the stupid things that I did this past year in fantasy football as an analyst.

00:01:41
Speaker 2: You don't want to hear all.

00:01:42
Speaker 1: The stupid things that I did as a human being walking through life. It was a good fantasy year overall, though I thought it was better than twenty twenty four, and I know I had a more successful year with my own teams than I did in twenty twenty four. But there were some big misses, some of them with bad process.

00:01:58
Speaker 2: So let's dig in. I mentioned this in the middle of the season on a.

00:02:03
Speaker 1: Mailbag episode, But there were two glaring misses for me this year that were really really annoying because I strayed away from my general process.

00:02:13
Speaker 2: One of them was with Calvin Ridley.

00:02:15
Speaker 1: I added him to the players the target list over the summer, and I completely regret doing that, not just because he was a total bust. I can live with a total bust when my process is sound. I just went away from that process. I've preached for years how pass catchers with rookie quarterbacks tend to underperform versus expectation.

00:02:34
Speaker 2: And at those scenarios.

00:02:36
Speaker 1: Where you have a wide receiver with a rookie quarterback, you can draft those players.

00:02:40
Speaker 2: You just shouldn't overdraft those players. Literally.

00:02:43
Speaker 1: The first sentence in the blurb for Ridley, which was added August fifteenth to the Draft Guide, so fortunately it was later in the draft season process, but the first sentence I wrote for Ridley said, quote, Rookie quarterbacks generally aren't good for their pass catchers in fantasy football. Yet I may excuses because even though that's true, I did note that in order for wide receivers to combat their environment with a rookie quarterback, the ones who actually did perform well with a rookie quarterback, they almost always had really strong target shairs. As I said with Ridley in the Draft Guide quote, the sixteen wide receivers who finished his top twenty four options with rookie quarterbacks average a twenty five point nine percent target share per game rate in their offenses. That's a borderline elite share, and that's the average. Instead of saying to myself, wow, it's probably gonna be pretty hard for Calvin Ridley to hit that high of a mark, I said, Ridley can do that because of the competition around him. So I broke two of my roles from a process standpoint. Number one, pass catchers with rookie quarterbacks are usually not great bets. And then number two, I assumed an elite target share for a non elite player. Not only that, but I literally had a trend in the guide about projected team touchdowns for middle round wide receivers and how that was a red flag for Calvin Ridley.

00:04:01
Speaker 2: It was just really dumb process.

00:04:04
Speaker 1: I'm mad at myself for adding Ridley during the final weeks of draft season. It was a process air, and in hindsight, we shouldn't have been surprised by that result at all. The other very blatant and clear process air that I had this year was with the Cowboys backfield. I thought Jaden Blue was a good double digit round pick. I thought Javonte Williams wasn't as good of a value, and saying that out loud today makes me want to curl up into a ball and never talk to anyone again out of sheer embarrassment. This was all bad process, at least most of it. I'm actually not that annoyed at liking Jayden Blue this year. The problem was not at least hedging my bets a little bit and being okay with Javonte Williams. I was lower than ADP with Williams and slightly higher with Blue, and that was done from a results standpoint, of course, but also a process one. Blue did look decent in the Zapp model because of his age adjusted receiving production combined with a solid speed score. But even when I I wrote him up as a late round dart throw in the guide, I talked about him being a change of pace player with one hundred plus attempt potential. Clearly, if that was his potential, that meant there was a lot of work elsewhere to be had in that offense, and that work would go to Javonte Williams. Because I did like Javonte Williams quite a bit more than like Miles Sanders. But when I talked about Williams being more of an avoid I realized after the fact that part way through the season that a.

00:05:26
Speaker 2: Lot of that logic was just field based. It wasn't super objective.

00:05:31
Speaker 1: Back in August, I first talked about how Williams was really inefficient in twenty twenty four with Denver and then essentially just gave Jaden Blew the receiving work from a projection standpoint. All the while, I took some quotes from Dallas coaches and formed my story around that instead of hard data, and that hard data, the more objective pieces is that we really shouldn't bank on Day three rookies to play a significant receiving role. Number one, number two. There was clearly enough early down work for Javonte Williams to be involved in SOA and number three. I talk about this all the time, but I don't want to overstate previous season efficiency marks at running back because it isn't super sticky year over year, And that was all inside what projected to be a good offense. I bought into the Cowboys offense this year. Basically, I just made a lot of fuel based assumptions with that Cowboys backfield, and they were all pretty stupid. I had some Javonte Williams, thankfully, because there were some leagues out there where no one wanted him. But I won one hundred percent should have been higher. And that's not even a results based take, that's a process based one. I didn't only have pre draft takes that were wrong. I do the fifteen Transactions newsletter and podcast in season each week. I got plenty wrong there too, But the top one this season was definitely when I recommended buying Lamar Jackson that was back entering Week eleven. From that point through Week seventeen, Lamar Jackson averaged nine point eight standard Fantasy points per game. Like you could not have had a worse recommendation. It was horrific. Now, I talked about that move quite a bit on the show in the following weeks, and look, it was wrong from a result standpoint, for sure, but I'm not totally totally upset about the process. He was also hurt in one of those games, but Jackson had a great schedule upcoming aside from a game against Pittsburgh, and it's Lamar Jackson. He's consistently been one of the best fantasy producers at quarterback of this era. Where I messed up was sort of underselling his injury and that he was just returning to form. It took him minute to actually see the same number of scrambles and design runs that we were used to seeing from Lamar Jackson, and that, in my eyes, really hurt his value. I also think I downplayed some of the divisional matchups, specifically two against Cincinnati. Not only was Cincinnati kind of trending to be better against the pass, but divisional games they have a tendency to be.

00:07:50
Speaker 2: Kind of wonkier.

00:07:52
Speaker 1: So I'm not like super super mad about that process, though it wasn't perfect and some of those things I've got to keep in mind. The result, though, absolute disaster.

00:08:03
Speaker 2: I got the Eagles passing attack wrong this year.

00:08:06
Speaker 1: I'm pretty pleased with how I handled Saquon Barkley, though there was a newsletter about that in the summer where I talked about his regression not just coming in the form of games missed after seeing so much volume in twenty twenty four. But I really thought we'd see a better Philly passing attack in twenty twenty five, mainly because it was almost impossible for them to be any more run heavy than they were in twenty twenty four. Gamescript often went their way, and Sakuon Barkley had an unbelievably efficient season for all the volume that he saw. In twenty twenty four, the Eagles had a pass right over expected of minus eight point eight, meaning their expected pass rate was eight point eight percentage points higher than their actual pass rate. They had fewer than five hundred dropbacks. Where I was right was that regression would hit. In twenty twenty five, the Eagles had five hundred and thirty two dropbacks. Their pass right over expected was minus two point five, significantly higher. Where I was wrong was twofold number one. The uptick and dropbacks actually wasn't as significant as I thought it would be, despite the clear change and pass rate over expected, And that's because the team was less efficient on offense, a lot less efficient, and they just ran fewer plays. Now, some of that was due to the efficiency aspect, but Kellen Moore was also offensive coordinator in twenty twenty four, he had a history of running at a fast pace. Year over year, the Eagles dropped by over six plays per game, so naturally just mathematically, even if pass rate improved quite a bit for Philadelphia, that's a rate statistic. You take that number and you multiply that by raw volume, and that's why you see just a modest shift in overall passing volume for the Eagles. Then you layer on Kevin Bittulo's offense. To me, he was the worst coordinator in all football this year. That's why he doesn't have a job right now. The lack of motion, the lack of creativity with his wide receiver route trees. It was just an absolute mess. And that was something that I should have factored in more before saying that Jalen Hurts was a target and before being into AJ Brown and DeVante Smith. Now to give myself a little bit of grace here, according to my average draft position numbers and looking at how players perform versus ADP expectation, Hurts underperformed by just one point two points per game this past year. That could have been a lot worse. And AJ Brown and DeVante Smith they almost had identical numbers sitting at one point two pper points per game below expected. So they were misses without a doubt, but they weren't egregious misses because there were some spiked weeks for that Philly passing attack, and my rankings were a lot higher on Dallas Goddard too, But I thought this was a good one to go over because it focused so heavily on the team level. Sometimes when you get things right, you can still get things wrong. In this case, I did get things right with the regression side, but I got things wrong overall. Because there are so many layers of this kind of thing. There's a lot of nuance, and I missed some of that nuance. Let's have a chat about the Jacksonville backfield next. My rankings were actually pretty in line with ADP when it came to Travis Etn, so that really wasn't that big of a hit or a miss. And you guys already know that I was low on Tank Bigsby before he was sent to Philadelphia. The lack of pass catching profile was a huge red flag for me. The miss was how I handled that backfield during the season. Travis Etn was a cell candidate for me multiple times early on, once back after week two and then once after week four, and there were a couple of reasons for that. Number one was unsustainable production after week four, for example, he was averaging over six yards per carry. He was scoring at a pretty high rate too, with three touchdowns over his first four games. The second reason was Beshal Tutin. I was really expecting Tuton to dig into Etn's role in a pretty legit way as the season went on. That never really came to fruition. There were instances where it looked like it was coming, but whether due to Etn just playing better or Touton's injuries that he dealt with this year, it never really materialized. This one's a little weird for me, though, because I don't always know how to judge a buyer cell transaction technically. When I called him a cell, he was at sixteen point seven PPR points per game. He finished at fifteen point two PPR points per game, so he did drop in production. That's because the rushing did indeed regress. He finished the year with four point three yards per carry, well below where he was trending the first month of the season. In fact, when I had him as a cell, Etn didn't reach ninety rushing yards in a single game from then on, So Week five onward, no ninety yard game, but the volume stayed pretty consistent, and Etn did a lot of work.

00:12:39
Speaker 2: As a receiver in the touchdown column.

00:12:40
Speaker 1: We can't forget that crazy three touchdown game that he had back in Week fifteen in the Fantasy playoffs, so I don't think it was a major miss for me. But I did miss on Twoton's second half breakout that never really happened. And even though the regression callout was right for Etn early on in the season, scoring over fifteen PPR points per game from then on out is still really useful in fantasy football. So I'd call that more of an L than a W. I say it all the time, but a running back's value in fantasy football will often just come down to a simple coaching decision. If a coach wants to split the backfield, he'll split that backfield, and then I'll have a big impact on who scores fantasy points. That brings me to Seattle and Kenneth Walker. I'm actually a little bit upset that I had Walker as a player to target this past year in the draft guide, mostly because one of the trends that I talked about in that guide is how earlier around running backs who have teammates with decent ADPs tend to underperform expectation. The obvious reason for that is because teammates end up stealing work and sometimes more work than expected, and that's what happened with Kenneth Walker and Zach Charbonet. Walker finished the year with a career low fifty percent running back rush are dv some context.

00:13:51
Speaker 2: About how low that was.

00:13:52
Speaker 1: His previous low was seventy percent, and he was at seventy percent to seventy six percent and his three seasons prior. This is quite literally the definition of running back value in fantasy football comes down to a coaching decision. The Seahawks just simply decided to make this more of a fifty to fifty backfield, and to be honest, I don't know if we would have been able to catch that very accurately. We saw multiple coordinators give Kenneth Walker a bigger share than what he saw in twenty twenty five, like a significantly bigger one, and then all the while, his twenty twenty four season from a receiving perspective, it's looking more like an outlier among his first four seasons in the league. I'm not projecting here, I'm just saying what's gone on for Kenneth Walker. He's now been between a seven point two percent and seven point nine percent target chair and three of his first four seasons in the NFL, but in twenty twenty four it was at thirteen point eight percent. Now, I did think we would see a little bit of a drop in target share for Kenneth Walker going into twenty twenty five. I didn't think we would see that big of a drop. But now we're looking at it with a four year sample and it does make some sense. Walker to me was just a really good scheme fit, and I still think that's the case, to be honest, but.

00:15:00
Speaker 2: I also think that got away from me a little bit in the end.

00:15:03
Speaker 1: Fantasy football is a game about numbers, real football fit that's always gonna matter, but sometimes that matters more from an efficiency standpoint than a cumulative production standpoint. The l for Walker was not factoring in Charbonay enough, a running back that I've always liked, and making some assumptions about his fit in the offense. I think it would have been fine to be a little bit higher than ADP with Walker, but not so much to call.

00:15:27
Speaker 2: Him out as a player to target.

00:15:31
Speaker 1: Speaking of backfield splits, This feels like a good time to talk about the Patriots, doesn't it. There's gonna be a lot of discussion this offseason on Twitter, on different discords, on Reddit about rookies and redraft leagues and how drafting rookies is just plain stupid because people were burned by them this year. But I don't think that's a fair conclusion to make personally for a lot of reasons. But I did do episode one thousand of the Late Round podcast where I talked about the rookie edge and redraft leagues, and what I found in that episode was but the edge was indeed declining a bit at running back, just based on people drafting them higher. That wasn't the case so much at wide receiver. I think we kind of saw that come to fruition in twenty twenty five. Nevertheless, I was in on Trayvon Henderson very in. It wasn't just the hype that got me in. Henderson was a player to target for me immediately when the Draft guide launched at the end of June, far before any.

00:16:24
Speaker 2: Of the hype.

00:16:25
Speaker 1: I just liked what he brought to the table as a prospect and how he fit that offense. In turn, I saw Ramandre Stevenson as more of a fade halfway through the season that was looking really, really rough. But then we know how that story ended. Trayvon Henderson ended up having some serious monster games. He was then concussing the Fantasy playoffs, and then he had a pretty mediocre Week seventeen game with just eighty two yards of rushing production post concussion. But here's the bottom line, it's hard to sell Henderson as a good pick in hindsight. He played one point one PPERO points per game below so expected, and that expectation was even higher for me because I would have drafted him slightly higher than his fortieth overall ADP. Now, I think most fantasy managers probably stopped using Trayvon Henderson in like weeks three or four, and then they started using him again when Rimandre Stevenson was injured, which kind of catapulted the Trayvon Henderson production. And so from that standpoint, he wasn't that bad of a fantasy asset to have on your team because he wasn't just taking zeros in your lineup week in and week out. That doesn't make him a good pick overall, though, like a third fourth round pick. That's not what you want. You want more production earlier in the season, but thankfully he did turn into a much better pick after like week seven or so. Meanwhile, Stevenson was the better pick at ADP overall. He didn't outperform ADP by a significant number of points, but he did peak at the right time during the season, the opposite of what we kind of expected to happen given Henderson's rookie status and look, I talked about that backfield plenty this year. Stevenson started to play significantly better during the final month of the year, so props to him for really turning his season around and doing what he needed to do. The question here, though, is about process and what might have gone wrong. I do think there were a lot of assumptions that I was making about Henderson that I shouldn't have made, specifically about his receiving profile. This seems to be a common theme today, given it was similar with Jayden Blue. But I needed to ground myself a little bit more with my rookie running back receiving projections. This year we only get between two to three rookie running backs per year with a ten percent target share, and since twenty eleven, we've had just seventeen rookie running backs finished that first season with eight or more games played and a target share above ten percent and a running back rush share above fifty percent. I essentially made that the floor for Trayvon Henderson. Rookies can really pay off big time in fantasy football. We have years of data on that, but one thing I'd like to communicate better and practice better is setting realistic floor expectations for those guys too. Now, staying on the rookie theme, let's finish things off today by talking about Matthew Golden. This one's really interesting for me because if any of you read last year's Prospect guide, you know there were a ton of red flags for Matthew Golden and his profile. I didn't really like him as a prospect, But in season long fantasy football, I'll often take chances on a player like this because I know that my prospect evaluation is not gonna be flawless, and the cost to acquire, which is really key here, it's not significant enough oftentimes to really be overly concerned about a player ZAP score or at least his floor from that ZAP score. That to me was the case for Golden, he wasn't drafted very high in redraft leagues. The ADP that I work with had him as like an eighth round pick. I'm bring him up on today's show though, because number one I did have him as a target, but then number two. He was one of four relevant wideouts this year to underperform versus ADP expectation by six or more PPR points. The other three were Ridley who I talk about earlier, Brian Thomas, and Justin Jefferson. Matthew Golden was a major bust, and I think process wise, for Golden, he did fit the mold of a middle round rookie wide receiver with a decent enough ZAP model score, even if that score was largely driven by draft capital and he was part of an ambiguous wide receiver room. We want to take advantage of those types of situations. But to be totally transparent with you guys, my plan in twenty twenty six, both in Dynasty and in redraft is just trust the models more to not treat Dynasty in season long. So totally different from a player take standpoint, because I think there is a lot of overlap and I should trust that overlap more with my Dynasty research, and look, even in doing that, I don't think I would have called Golden a fade or anything, but I wouldn't have called him a target either. I can merely just let him be. He doesn't need to be someone that I'm gonna go after when my process showed me that he wasn't a talented player. So Golden was four fortunately a Dynasty w but this is a season long episode and he was most definitely a redraft L Now. I know there were plenty of other things that I got wrong. You're probably listening to this right now and you're like, why didn't you talk about this situation or that guy or this player. I just really wanted to get a good sample of some of these things and talk about a number of different processes, and honestly, I think I highlighted some of the biggest misses that I had this year. It really does help me to go through all this, and I hope it helps you guys too.

00:21:29
Speaker 2: That's it for today's show, though thanks to all of you for listening.

00:21:31
Speaker 1: If yet subscribe to the Late Round Fantasy Football podcast, make sure you are by searching for it pretty much anywhere podcast can be found and follow me on Twitter and on Blue Sky at Late Round QB. Thanks for listening everyone, Hope you have a great weekend, and if you're in the path of this winter storm like i am, I hope you stay safe. There's some chance of the content schedule is impacted by that storm in some way, so if the podcast feed seems a little bit weird next week it's not updating or something, make sure to check out my Twitter or my Blue Sky feeds. I'll be sure to update you guys on what's going on. Otherwise, enjoy the conference championship games this weekend and take care